The Treaty of Utrecht, which established the Peace of Utrecht, comprises a series of individual peace treaties, rather than a single document, signed by the belligerents in the War of the Spanish Succession, in the Dutch city of Utrecht in...

Ferdinand VI (Spanish: Fernando VI), called the Learnt, was King of Spain from 9 July 1746 until his death. He was the fourth son of the previous monarch Philip V and his first wife Maria Luisa of Savoy. Ferdinand, the third member of the S...

Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembe...

The Siege of Barcelona was a battle at the end of the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), which pitted Archduke Charles of Austria (backed by Britain and the Netherlands, i.e. the Grand Alliance), against Philip V of Spain, backed by Fra...

Christoph Willibald (von) Gluck was a German composer, one of the most important opera composers of the Classical music era, particularly remembered for Orfeo ed Euridice. He is also remembered as the music teacher of Marie-Antoinette who a...

The second surviving son of J.S. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel was the most innovative and idiosyncratic member of an extremely talented musical family. His music, unlike that of his father or that of the master he influenced, Haydn, did not d...

Claude Adrien Helvétius was a French philosopher and littérateur. In 1758, Helvétius published his philosophical magnum opus, a work called De l'esprit (On Mind). Its atheistic, utilitarian and egalitarian doctrines raised a public outcry a...

Lancelot Brown (1716 – 6 February 1783), more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English landscape architect. He is remembered as "the last of the great English eighteenth-century artists to be accorded his due", and "England's grea...

Charles III (Spanish: Carlos III; Italian: Carlo III) was the King of Spain and the Spanish Indies from 1759 to 1788. He was the eldest son of Philip V of Spain and his second wife, the Princess Elisabeth Farnese. In 1731, the fifteen-year-...

James Lind was a Scottish physician. He was a pioneer of naval hygiene in the Royal Navy. By conducting the first ever clinical trial, he developed the theory that citrus fruits cured scurvy. He argued for the health benefits of better vent...

Jean François de Saint-Lambert was a French poet and military officer, but he is most remembered for his involvement in two love affairs.
Over the winter of 1747-48, Voltaire and his entourage took up residence in Lunéville. Saint-Lambe...

Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein was a Dutch Christian minister of Ghanaian birth who was one of the first known sub-Saharan Africans to study at a European university and one of the first Africans to be ordained as a minister in the Dutch R...

Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art. "The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology", Win...

Empress Maria Theresa was the first and only female head of the Habsburg dynasty. She was Archduchess of Austria, and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia and ruler of other territories from 1740 until her death. She also became the Holy Roman Empr...

Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's formula for obtaining solutions to t...